Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/74

 58 HISTORY OF GREECE. simple imagery, and requiring something of novelty or peculiarity in eeery fresh production. To captivate their emotions, it was sufficient to depict, with genius and fervor, the more obvious manifestations of human adventure or suffering, and to idealize that type of society, both private and public, with which the hearers around were familiar. Even in describing the gods, where a great degree of latitude and deviation might have been expected, 1 we see that Homer introduces into Olympus the pas- sions, the caprices, the love of power and patronage, the alterna- tion of dignity and weakness, which animated the bosom of an ordinary Grecian chief; and this tendency, to reproduce in sub- stance the social relations to which he had been accustomed, would operate still more powerfully when he had to describe sim- ply human characters, the chief and his people, the warrior and his comrades, the husband, wife, father, and son, or the imperfect rudiments of judicial and administrative proceeding. That his narrative on all these points, even with fictitious charac- ters and events, presents a close approximation to general reality, there can be no reason to doubt. 2 The necessity under which he lay of drawing from a store, then happily unexhausted, of per- sonal experience and observation, is one of the causes of that freshness and vivacity of description for which he stands unri- valled, and which constituted the imperishable charm of the Iliad and Odyssey from the beginning to the end of Grecian literature. While, therefore, we renounce the idea of chronologizing or historicizing the events of Grecian legend, we may turn them to profit as valuable memorials of that state of society, feeling, and intelligence, which must be to us the starting-point of the history of the people. Of course, the legendary age, like all those which succeeded it, had its antecedent causes and determining condi- tions ; but of these we know nothing, and we are compelled to 1 Kal Toi>f i9eot> 6e 6i& TOVTO KUVTEC $aai 8aaifavE0ftoiovf (3'iovc TUV $&i> (Aristot. Politic, i. tf> character recognized between one race of Greeks and another, or even between Greeks and Trojaps. See Helbig, Die Sittlichen Zastande de Griechischcn Heldenalters, part ii. p. 53.
 * In the pictures of the Homeric Heroes, there is no material difference of